"Glenn assumes that every dollar is spent on this single issue which of course is not only nonsense it's precisely the sloppiness that Glenn typically tells us is gospel."

-- Electro Moron

You still haven't read the article, have you.

There is no "fear of third parties".

If there were, Lincoln (The Republicans were a third party) and Teddy Roosevelt (Bull Moose Progressives), to name the most recent, would never have been elected. You are no political scientist and neither am I but the problem is institutional and structural. Not some evil plan, as some conlude, to disenfranchise the people. It was the framers intent that there be no political factions or parties. The framers hoped to avoid the factionalism they saw tearing Europe apart. They just couldn't foresee everything. The law of unintended consequences. It wasn't until 1950 that a French fellow even figured it out. Duverger's Law. Granted, there are barriers to any third party, until one of the two major parties makes such a fatal error or becomes an anachronism. That may be happening now. You want more than two parties? Easy to do. You will find that has its own set of problems. Then there are the problems of the incumbency protection racket.

Being elected to Congress is tantamount of a lifetime appointment similar to being named to the Federal bench, at least in the House of Representatives. According to government watchdog, Common Cause, in 2004, 399 Congressional incumbents ran for re-election. Of that number only seven lost and two of those seven ran against other incumbents in Texas. Thus, a 98.3 percent incumbent re-election rate nationwide and a 99 percent re-election rate for all states outside of Texas. Since 1976, the incumbent re-election rate for the House has dipped below 90 percent only once, in 1992, when it was 88.3%...

http://www.watchblog.com/republicans/archives/002763.html

Gerrymandering, redistricting, etc. If you think Green's or Libertarians or any other third party that comes along to replace one of the majors in the two party system will do anything differently, you are being a bit naive.

Political science is not my field but I do read about it.

Duverger's law is a principle which asserts that a plurality rule election system tends to favor a two-party system.

The discovery of this tendency is attributed to Maurice Duverger, a French sociologist who observed the effect and recorded it in several papers published in the 1950s and 1960s. In the course of further research, other political scientists began calling the effect a “law” or principle. Duverger's law suggests a nexus or synthesis between a party system and an electoral system: a proportional representation (PR) system creates the electoral conditions necessary to foster party development while a plurality system marginalizes many smaller political parties...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duverger's_law

The answer is, "Of course."

Dissent is monitored in this country. Or rather, I should say, "left wing" dissent is monitored. The more fascistically inclined are given stipends and sinecures and sent daily or hourly emails of talking points they should play up.

The military monitors dissent, the various spy agencies do, some other government agencies do, "Homeland" Security does, local police do, private companies and contractors do. There are even religious "spies" monitoring their neighborhoods for likely converts as well as likely revolutionaries.

We are very much a One Nation Under Surveillance.

Main Core is apparently intended as a database for the eventual round ups of malcontents and troublemakers -- which of course could include you or me or anyone at all. As we've seen with the No Fly lists, or the various felon purges of voter rolls, the names that wind up on the designated lists bear little or no relationship to the what the holders of those names actually believe or have done, and once they are designated for exclusion from normal rights and privileges, that's it. They have essentially no recourse, or at best only a very cumbersome and likey faulty recourse.

The fact is this situation keeps getting worse, more restrictive, broader based, and more dangerous. More and more "lists" are compiled, ever more reasons are found to add names to those lists, no reason is ever found to remove them, they become more and more arbitrary, and at any time these lists can be used by the authorities for the purpose they were intended, to target and round up 'disposable' Americans for indefinite detention.

And it is highly unlikely that, should the time come when these lists are used for their intended purpose, anyone will do anything to stop it.

"As long as they don't come for me!"

The nice thing about it is that our telecom monopolies have been cooperating for years in the endless compiling of these lists, contrary to the law.

The only advantage We, The People have in this nightmare is that our Authorities are not quite as competent as the security authorities in Terry Gilliam's masterful film, "Brazil."

(Which is why, in case anyone wondered, the title of all the FISA posts at my blog is "Brazil!")

http://youtube.com/watch?v=P1QqXAGH19Q

http://harpers.org/archive/2008/04/hbc-90002843

April 15, 2008
McCain’s “Courtly Southerner”
By Ken Silverstein

Old Spy magazine story on Charles Black not nearly as admiring as New York Times profile

A few days ago the New York Times ran a generally flattering profile of Charles Black, one of the top aides to Senator John McCain’s presidential campaign. Reported over lunch at Morton’s near Washington’s K Street corridor, the Times story called Black “a courtly Southerner” and “an unflappable spinner, responding in the heat or silliness of a campaign with the well-modulated tone of a man who cannot believe that not everyone would see his position as the only reasonable one.”

I’ve no doubt that Black is a delightful lunchtime companion and probably pets the dog at home too, but–like a number of McCain’s closest aides–he’s got quite a few skeletons in the closet. The Times noted several of these but devoted very little time to Black’s darker days, especially his work over the years as a foreign lobbyist.

An indispensable read about Black’s past–sadly not available online–was a wonderful 1992 piece by Art Levine published in Spy magazine, titled “Publicists of the Damned.” (Levine’s piece was a huge inspiration when I went undercover last year to write about foreign lobbyists.) Back then Black was the lead partner at the lobbying firm called Black, Manafort, Stone and Kelly. His colleagues included Paul Manafort, now the business partner of Rick Davis, McCain’s campaign chairman, and the notorious Republican operative Roger Stone.

Spy reviewed the operations of a number of top beltway lobbying firms and ranked Black, Manafort as the “sleaziest” of the firms it surveyed, giving it a “blood-on-the-hands” rating of four. That was a full bloody hand more than the rating accorded to lobbyist Edward van Kloberg, whose clients included Saddam Hussein and Nicolae Ceausescu of Romania.

Black, Manafort’s own clients at the time included Mobuto Sese Seko of Zaire, one of the most kleptocratic rulers of all time, Ferdinand Marcos of the Philippines, also known for stealing a few billion dollars, and the murderous Angolan rebels known as UNITA. “The well-compensated flacks at Black, Manafort stand at the pinnacle of organizational apologism,” Spy noted. “Name a corrupt despot, and Black Manafort will name the account.”

The magazine also said that Black, Manafort’s “involvement in the Bush and Reagan presidential campaigns allowed it to promise–and sometimes deliver–special, executive-level rewards to its egregious clients.” Which somehow seems relevant to 2008 as Black, who currently has numerous corporate clients, was recently reported to have been making business phone calls from McCain’s campaign bus.

As to Black, Manfort’s work in the 1980s for UNITA, Spy cited a former government official who believed that the firm’s “hawkish congressional lobbying for more military aid” delayed the process that had led to a cease-fire. “Black, Manafort played an important part in keeping the Angola war going,” the official told the magazine, which concluded: “So the war lasted another two years and claimed a few thousand lives! So what? What counts to a Washington lobbyist is the ability to deliver a tangible victory and spruce up his client’s image.”

A “courtly Southerner,” or an influence peddler and apologist for despots? Perhaps both, but one suspects Spy came closer to the mark [...] than the New York Times did a few days ago.

- - Ken Silverstein 04/15/2008

Charles Krauthammer:
http://azstarnet.com/sn/byauthor/227411

Charles Krauthammer
02.29.2008

Everyone knows the First Amendment protects freedom of religion, speech, press and assembly. How many remember that, in addition, the First Amendment protects a fifth freedom — to lobby?

Of course it doesn't use the word lobby. It calls it the right "to petition the Government for a redress of grievances." Lobbyists are people hired to do that for you, so that you can actually stay home with the kids and remain gainfully employed rather than spend your life in the corridors of Washington.

- - Charles Krauthammer 02/29/2008